This incident was as avoidable as it is embarrassing for the council, but it is a situation which is repeated up and down the country on an all too regular basis. How many more times do people in the state sector need to be told to encrypt personal and sensitive data?

Perhaps a more pertinent issue, however, is why this data needed to be held in a council worker’s home.

The state holds far too much unnecessary information on its citizens and rather than concentrate too much on the security angle, I would rather we question whether so much data needs to be collected at all.